My Trip to SLAM

Two weekends ago I visited the St. Louis Art Museum.  I'm not a St. Louis native so it was my first time there and I thought very highly of it.  My roommate and I took a couple of hours and browsed around the various exhibits, and I did notice some of the commonly recurring trends surrounding women in art.
First of all, the vast majority of artists are indeed male.  I'd never really thought about that fact before taking this course.  Although fine arts is often viewed as a female-dominated or "feminine" field, apparently much of the work that is considered professional or advanced enough to be put in a museum is done by men. However, many of the subjects of paintings or sculptures are women.  It's interesting to me because I don't really understand how a female perspective can be accurately conveyed by a male, but that's what the focus of many pieces of art are; a seemingly female perspective from a male artist.   The majority of the female subjects were nude, and likewise, the majority of nudes were female subjects. Another thing that interested me was the variation of the body types in centuries-old art. There was certainly an ideal that existed, but the women in these pieces were much more curvy than they are in a lot of modern art.  It seemed the essential focus was the natural curves of a woman- the hips and breasts were accentuated, and they were never stick thin. (Perhaps a focus on the value of the body for childbirth?)
I found one piece in an Asian art exhibit that really intrigued me. The information card and a picture of the sculpture are below.

 If you can read the card, it explains that this sculpture is of the Hindu god Siva. The god is half man and half woman, divided down the middle. It is said to symbolize "the great unity of all things and the complementary aspects of gender and sexuality," which I thought was really cool.  Instead of having the masculine side domineer the art, both the feminine and the masculine come together to make a piece of art that fuses together and shows the necessity and harmony of both sexes.  It was interesting to me that this in fact is a Hindu god, and the feminine side isn't regarded as any less than the masculine side.  So often we discuss gods in a masculine fashion, so I like the concept of a female (or at least half female) god being just as worthy of worship.   I also like the attitude of unity in the universe.